Psychopathy in Politics

Unpredictability of an embarassing election

The most powerful nation on earth, the geography that still absorbs the best and most courageous minds on the globe, has managed to narrow down its three hundred million population down to two embarrasing choices. For their president, and commander in chief.

The two-party system is locked up. Money has reinfoced its power. In once being the land of the free and the home of the brave, people do not choose their faith freely anymore. America is no longer a democracy.

On one side the democratic party secretly back-stabbed Bernie Sanders, for a politician with a careless history of interventionism, bully and arms sales. On the other side a TV host with the scariest promises rarely heard in that level of power became the finalist of the republican party. And his rhetorics has already polarized the country in two or more hostile clusters.

It is hard to predict how the US (and the world) would look like after each of the two. But indeed harder to especulate that with Donald Trump.

Psychopaths and politics

I have no access to clinical diagnosis of Donald Trump and neither do I much belive in those labels. But Donald Trump is depicted by its opponents as a narcissist, or sometimes even a psychopath. These labels officially speaking cover the bottom one to four percent of the range of human empathy. True or false Trump has an attitude.

And I myself know of a politician who was certainly a psychopath by any possible measure. Those who have followed the Iranian politics would recognize the Ahmadinejad of Iran. Both are primitive and instictive enough to have been resembled to monkeys or alpha gurrilas.

But how can an average ape climb up the ladders of human power hirarchy and reach some of its highest tops? Showman ship? Trump is called a Narcissists who posseses not much quality and especially not related to the job of precidency, though he is good at mimicing the values around him and growing bigger by sucking the juice out of the things in their environment, without many considerations.

So if it is so that Trump has some traits of Ahmadinejad (and that he is a so-called Energy vampire) he should not morally hesitate to backstab his supports in the long-run and after they served their purpose for him.

Ahmadinejad which was the forced choice of the Iranian hardliners and took the power with coup by backstabing the rivals brutally, quite quickly started to make trouble for his companions and friends. That included eventually many conflicts with the supreme leader who had paid a big price by taking his side while they stole the votes of a nation in the Iranian 2009 election with the help of the military.

A psychopath’s strategy is defined by “self” and not so much tied to the long term goals of a greater whole, their environment, the constitution, a regime, a party, or an establishment. Their circle of empathy can be literally as tight as their skin boundaries, which enforces no commitment whatsoever, even to their closest friends. The core values of a psychopaths – self benefit – does not change, but the means of reaching those goals may change quickly by any change in the environment; A change in the environment, such as being elected.

The interaction of our politicians within the bubble around them is still driven by the primate brain evolved in the groups of 100 to 150 people. Now that the man kind is connected, such small selfish traits of parasitic behavior or psychopathy, and a minor flaw in practicing empathy can have world-wide effects and can spark terrible disasters that would destroy us all together.

It could have been a better approach in political science, to study the interaction of our politicians and how they play with the strings tied to them in their social organizations. It is crucial to follow up how people have climbed up the ladders, driven by their psychology, to see what damages they may cause in that system later.

Back to Trump and Ahmadinejad and that breed. Assuming that These folks have got no empathy, it is likely for their Amygdala (the so-called empathy center in the brain). For the moment that AI is still not that scary I think that the lack of empathy in power is the most important danger that the human kind faces. No empathy for the underdog means no empathy for the superior or colleagues and it brings pure uncertainty. A psychopath will not play within the rules. In this case Trump would probably have difficulties to show long-term commitment to any system, any party, or the establishment. He would not be committed to his fundraisers and lobyists, unless they make sure they have the means to control him during a future precidency. Do they?

If Trump is a real narcissist or psychopath he will serve himself only and this is generally the recipe to guess what his next step is. In this case he will not collaborate with other psychopaths within the system either, and will eventually make trouble for them and perhaps for the whole establishment. He would probably cause trouble for the other centers of power around him.

If Trump truly is a manipulator and his circle of empathy includes him and no further, then I think his precidency would have similarities to Ahmadinejad’s precidency in Iran, only that it is scaled up to a global level. Study the path of Ahmadinejad and may be that patterns is educational.

Clinton on the other hand, has a curropt history but she is more of a sane person. She will play within the rules and will serve an establishment. She will certainly collaborate with a good chunk of moderaltely selfish people, and will thus manage to cause some well-thought damage to the world. To optimize a local benefit of a group of elites that is quite bigger then herself. Clinton would be the continuation of the status quo. An increase the inequality gap and destruction of several other countries in the middle east would be foreseen from now if Clinton takes power. About Trump, we don’t know nothing.

One thing is that Anti Trump leftist camp fails to see that even for the main body of Trump supporters, this is a class war. And well, both sides need the majority and both play the same card this card since afterall this is still a democracy in form, and cannot be officially run by the elites for the elites, just yet.

Face-off type of comparison and focusing only on the personality of a candidate is misleading, but we can claim that if we get concentrated evil in Trump, we are getting distributed evil in his alternative. So go and especualte for yourself which one causes more damage and to which group. I don’t have the data for that.

There is a hirarchy of power anywhere you look at. Psychopath (and that term includes all of us in some levels) will cause damage for those who are on their blind-spots, i.e. outside of the empathy circle. And none of us have a universeally stretched circle of empathy. At least to keep the human kind intact and for the survival of our own species, it is important to bring to the public, the skills we ALL need to posses, in order to defuse the psychopathic traits around us, so they safely inhibit and ignore the careless harm that they can cause to a much greater whole. This way, may be we ultimately avoid or postpone the singularity that is awaiting us.